How to use 7 tools to create 1 simple survey (en)

Recently I tweeted a way of “How I create surveys” which had a few likes after a while. #FollowMeOnTwitter 🙂 The funny part is, that I tweeted such a complicated way of doing a survey and the tweet still got likes for that. Maybe you can call it collaboration as well…

So in this article I show you the crazy way if you really want to use seven tools or even more for one simple survey. If you want to see the German version click here.

If you first want to see “How to master common Challenges in Office 365” with a few tools, you can check the articles about PowerShell, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams.

Spoiler: This is one way to use the available tools in the most absurd way and shouldn’t be taken that seriously.

Create a survey in Microsoft Forms

To create a new survey with Microsoft Forms, go to your Office 365 portal dashboard and open Forms. If you don’t find Forms click on “All apps” link.

All apps overview

You can pin the application to your dashboard to get easier access in the future if needed.

Pin a application to the launcher

After you opened Microsoft Forms, just click on “New Form”.

Create your new form

Then create your form / survey. For this article I kept it simple.

A simple survey form

Click in the URL and copy it to your clipboard. You will need it in the next step.

Forms in general offers a lot more and personally, I really love it. To see more about Microsoft Forms, you can check the link at Collab365.

Edit SharePoint Team site to add survey

Edit SharePoint Team site to add survey

Next open your automatically generated SharePoint Team site. If you need a better overview which services automatically come with creating a Team you can check out the incredible overview by Matt Wade at I can SharePoint.

Edit your SharePoint page and add the web part Microsoft Forms.

Add the Microsoft Forms web part to SharePoint

Click now on “Add existing form” and on the right-hand side the properties will show up. You will see now, why you should have copied the URL to the clipboard. If you didn’t do it you can click in the properties on “Go to Microsoft Forms” to get the URL. After you pasted the URL you can click on “OK” and publish the site again.

Load the existing form in the web part

Collect Feedback via Microsoft Flow – Part 1

Collect Feedback via Microsoft Flow – Part 1

Open Microsoft Flow and create a new flow from blank and select “Search hundreds of connectors and triggers”.

Create your Microsoft Flow from blank

First, type in a name for your flow (1), search for “forms” (2) and select “Microsoft Forms – When a new response is submitted” (3).

Starting with Microsoft Flow

From the drop-down menu select your form. Then click on new step and select “Add an action”.

Select your form in Flow

In the search bar type “forms get response” and select “Microsoft Forms – Get response details”.

Get response details of form

Now it gets even more crazy 🙂

Choose your form in the “Form ID” row. Then click below in the “Response ID” row, click “Add dynamic content” and select the tab “Expression”.

You are still here?

Noice

Now paste the following into the “fx” row and click on “OK”:

1

first(triggerBody()?['value'])?['resourceData']?['responseId']

Your flow should look like this:

Adding fancy “Response ID” stuff

You might wonder why all this fancy stuff? Well, now we can directly access the feedback values. Currently you need this to get access to the real values. Before we continue to add the next step, we have to create the Excel sheet and save it to OneDrive.

Get response id in Flow and Forms set

PS: Now is maybe a good time to save your flow 🙂

Create Excel and save it to OneDrive

Create Excel and save it to OneDrive

This part is quite easy and does not need much explanation. Open Excel, create a table and save that file to OneDrive. Easy, right?

For more transparency I named the columns just like the questions in the form. Don’t forget the name of your table. You need it soon.

Excel file the table

If you wonder why there are two additional columns we did not ask for in the survey, those are values we get automatically with the feedback from the form.

Collect Feedback via Microsoft Flow – Part 2

Collect Feedback via Microsoft Flow – Part 2

Back in flow we edit our Flow “Forms feedback”, add a new step, search for “Excel” and select “Excel – Insert row”.

Add action Excel – Insert row

Then select the uploaded Excel file and select the table. (That’s where you need the name of your table). Sometimes you don’t get a value in the drop-down. Just select “Enter a custom value” and type in the table name. Mostly it works and you get the columns resolved. If not, wait a minute or two, close everything and try it again. Sorry, but sometimes the cloud needs that as well. 🙂

In those rows you can now add the specify values.

Filled Excel columns with Forms values

Add a task in Planner

Add a task in Planner

I think you are now in the “flow”, right? 🙂 Let’s create a simple task in Planner via Microsoft Flow.

Add a new step, add an action and search for “planner task” and select “Planner – Create a task”. Tip: The more specific you are, the more accurate are your results.

To get your “Plan Id” open Planner and click into your plan. It is called just like the team you created.

Copy the last portion of the URL (the string behind “planID=”) and paste it into the row “Plan Id”.

Set the Planner ID

Then fill out the additional rows as needed. Of course, you need at least a title.

I also filled the “Bucket ID” which you should be able to choose from the drop-down if you created buckets and I also set an “Start Date Time” with an expression “utcNow()”. You can dig into more details on how to fill the remaining two rows. Just check the link at the documentation directly from Microsoft or check out one of the Flownauts like Melissa Hubbard.

For this article I leave it as it is. I think it is now almost complex enough 🙂

Partly filled Planner task properties

I know this flow will now create each time a new task. I just wanted to show you the craziness you can create 🙂

You are almost done. Last step is to load your data in Power BI.

Load it in Power BI

Load it in Power BI

Go to https://powerbi.microsoft.com and click on sign in. Of course, you should have access to it. If you have a tenant, you can get free Power BI licenses which are cool to get started.

On the dashboard click on “Get”, but make sure you click it on the right panel…

How to get files in Power BI

From there it is straight forward to get the data in Power BI. Choose file, click, clack, done. The visualization is totally up to you and really depends on what you want to show. The result in this demo is really simple and looks like this:

Simple Power BI Dashboard

Visualize the Report in Teams

Visualize the Report in Teams

Save your Dashboard / Report and you can use it directly in your Microsoft Teams in it’s own tab. Open one last time Microsoft Teams (e.g. in your web browser) go to your “Survey” Teams and click on the “+” icon next to the tabs.

Add a Power BI tab in Microsoft Teams

Then select your saved report and click on “Save”.

Select Power BI Report for tab

And then you have finally finished the seven tools for one simple survey approach. The embedded Power BI report in Microsoft Teams should look similar to the following picture:

Embedded Power BI Report in Microsoft Teams

Conclusion and optional craziness

Conclusion and optional craziness

You can do more if you like! 🙂 Get updated in a Team channel or you can get a mobile notification or other crazy things with Microsoft Flow. Record the whole scenario and save it to Microsoft Stream or you can even send old school mails if something happened.

There are always two sides of the coin. Some say, “It is flexible and super integrated”, others say, “It is not clear which tool to use when”. I recommend to really think about what is useful for you. And that, well… depends on your point of view. Sorry…

If you want to stay tuned please follow me on Twitter. I am trying to be as active as possible and get more “social”. Maybe a flow might help? 😀

Last but not least a big thanks to all the people and communities I mentioned in this article. Make sure to give them a like and check them out! Collab365Today, Matt Wade and Melissa Hubbard